Friday, July 27, 2007

Friday, July 27

Pat Tillman's cluster of three bullet holes in the forehead from about 10 yards away meant the "evidence did not match up with the scenario as described," according to an army medical examiner in 2004 we're just discovering. But the story now goes that he was asking for it:It has been widely reported by the AP and others that Spc. Bryan O'Neal, who was at Tillman's side as he was killed, told investigators that Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" again and again.

But the latest documents give a different account from a chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman was killed.

The chaplain said that O'Neal told him he was hugging the ground at Tillman's side, "crying out to God, help us. And Tillman says to him, `Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God's not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling -'"

Pinned under hostile fire, Tillman goes George Patton on a cowering comrade and gets fragged for his overwrought bluster. And yet: "No evidence of enemy fire was found at the scene. No one was hit by enemy fire, and no government equipment was struck."

It's all so very Lindsay Lohan. She wasn't driving: "it was the black kid." And the pants she was wearing with the cocaine in the pocket? "Those aren't my pants!" The thing is, when it's the military that's drunk and barreling down the freeway, boasting "I can do whatever the fuck I want," it can.

Also:

Adding to Iowa's surfeit of weirdness, Burlington City Council candidate Keith Jacobs reports "an oval-shaped craft about 50 feet long and 40 feet wide, with a blue light on the bottom cruising about 400 to 500 feet above the ground. It had no identifying marks, no wings, no propellers and no means of propulsion such as rockets or jets."

"I would say it was some sort of antigravity device," Jacobs said. "About four seconds was all I got a glimpse of it, and it shot off fast."

The craft sped across the sky in a northwest direction, descended slightly revealing a black or dark gray checkered top, then curved west and shot off in the direction of the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, Jacobs said.

(Mention of the ammunition plant reminds me that Mothman's favourite haunt was a WWII munitions dump, called the "TNT area.")

And another sighting from the UK, with photo and video at the link: "a couple were mesmerised as seven red lights flew silently and at great speed above their house in the early hours of the morning":"There were seven lights flying fast over the house. Two of them were flying round each other. They were flying very close together, closer than planes. They were going so fast I couldn't focus on them.

"I ran inside and got my camcorder. I thought they could be helicopters but when I zoomed in I was scared to death. They were glowing red in the middle. I'm a very logical person. We are not into the paranormal at all. I thought people would think we were barmy if we said we saw UFOs."

No one moved; Thor's whirling hammer slowed, then dropped. In the silence, Chris knew his left femur had shattered - along with most of the bones in his hands - leaving him perched on one leg. Yet his sole regret was that he could not emulate an aged Jew he had heard spoken of by some concentration camp survivors.

Standing in front of the grave he had been forced to dig for himself, the old man never begged, or cried to the SS, nor slumped in despair. He just turned from his murderers, dropped his pants, and said aloud in Yiddish as he bent over, "Kish mir im toches."

69 Comments:

That clip gave me the Brazil chill (knot) especially when I realized they lived in Shangri-La Towers! Double especially since I incorporated my Shangri-La tribute a year ago today. I would tell you about my super-duper-double-secret -corporation Jeff, but then I’d have to kill you (knot):

and who could forget the cheap earthly Shangri-la wanna be created by not-so-free Mason FDR”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_David

Sounder – good points re: “If one wishes to play the game….” And “….The trick for the nasties is to get the creatives to become attached to negative polarity expressions of either Ahrimanic or Luciferic (mostly luciferic) strains of expression.”

And Shrubbery – re: “This internet intermingling reminds me of the Orgy at the Castle in Eyes Wide Shut. Everyone has a mask....a much more effective one than they utilize in their non-internet social interactions.”

……Maybe we should organize a Rigint “re: union” we can do it just like classmates.com and the noble knight Jeff Wells could be the keeper of keys as the organizer. I know a couple enchanted forests betwixt here and “Oh Canada” – I personally love taking off my mask (the closer Eve can get to naked the better).

Okay, Jeff--are you teasing me or is it just the serendipity of Brin's defiant meme and my antipathy toward the Brin behind the fictional curtain? Or am I just inflating the importance of my descriptions of the man's "real motives"?

I'm open to all the possibilities I can imagine...and hopefully to those that I can't.

At this point, I'm wondering if Terry Gilliam finds his prophetic vision somehow inevitable. I mean, I know that you assign a certain degree of "reality" to the terrorists (that they are not merely constructs of the CIA, for example), but if the Arab world had no just grievances--say, the whole history of our "interaction" with them since Lawrence of Arabia suicided himself--would this decidely suspicious Clash of Civilizations really be necessary much less inevitable?

One can't help but wonder at the fortuitousness of Brin's "angry young men" in the the security/liberty debate...a more suspicious mind than mine would almost be willing to find their existence in the scheme of things gratuitous, given what we know about the CIA's "need" for Gehlen's estimates.

"Okay, Jeff--are you teasing me or is it just the serendipity of Brin's defiant meme and my antipathy toward the Brin behind the fictional curtain?"

The only person I mean to tease here is me. (It's like trying to tickle yourself.) Your mention yesterday of Brin jogged a memory, and I do like that moment in Life Eaters where the man creates a myth to inspire future resistance to the monster-gods. (Though how he expected the myth to propagate, I dunno.)

I figured it was some such of a thing; jarred recollections & the general synchrony of ideas tend to work that way. Not that I would have minded if you had been scratching my Brin-itch--I like to think that I'm thick-skinned enough to really mean it when I use my awful, Chicago-inflected Python voice to say, "Shut up you silly bitch. It's only a bit of fun."

I'm actually feeling a bit embarrassed (ever notice that phonetically you're "bare-assed" in that state?) to have drawn your attention to my little feud with the transparent one. I also realize that I owe you a whopping debt of gratitude for letting me insert my at times irrelevant looking broadsides within the friendly confines here. I really am sincere about that one, too, even though it's going to bring a rain of ass-kissing allegations down on my poor cracked skull.

That other origin-of-the-terrorists question is an important one, though, wouldn't you say? On the one hand, we know that many (if not all) of the world's conflicts are engineered and that certain groups quite openly profit from them. On the other hand, why should it be that some freedom fighters win us over without the State pimping their righteousness (as in anyone Reagan admired), while others leave us fearful and worse.

I don't know if you were aware of it at the time, but something like this happened in the American Upper Midwest in 1973 during the 2nd Wounded Knee. The only Americans who weren't on the Native side were the ones who would have followed Patton anywhere he suggested. Well, at least in my neighborhood.

Yeah but isn't the wide (as opposed to specific) catatgory of scientologists a bit unbelievable. I heard, and this is much easier for my mind to digest, that it was one-armed, bearded-hemaphrodite, midget scientologists that were harrassing them. This kind of takes off the hook: the masons; law "enforcement"; and all other lower peons in their pyramid...which is much safer for me and allows me to sleep at night and allows me to feel warm and fuzzy.

1. Sounder is not shallow because if someone was to rape his mother, he would demonstrate outside of his house with picket signs instead of shooting the rapist with his shotgun that he keeps in the closet. If the picket signs didn’t work, he in his most diplomatic way, would ask him to please stop, then ask him rhetorical questions that imply that what he is doing is not worth it.

2. I am shallow because if someone was raping anyone I cared about, I would shoot them in the fucking head.

Jeff, come on, now, don't censor Omni....it grinds against the principles of the resistance of empire. If Omni is false, he/she will collapse themselves soon enough....maybe not soon enough for your purposes, but in the scheme of things, soon enough. No need to silence Omni. The astute know how to see through such things...when they are such things. Give, at least part of, your audience credit. We didn't make it this far wihtout being discriminating.

Eve, I love you. You are a breath of fresh air to what can be a blog of despair....and maybe that's the point of this hangout. If it is, I thank the psyops folks for the hangout.....my life wouldn't be as full without it. There you go, Jeff...how's that for a twist on Brinn's catchy little line (if Brin is misspelled, it was intentional). Interesting guy (Brinnn), with some interesting ideas, but what an egotistical motherfucker....nonetheless, I like the quote...it says so much in so few words.

Tilman (misspelled purposely, or not) was a fool, and I think it is blatantly superficial, and oh so politically correct, to claim him as an ally in this "thought" endeavor against empire. Kudos to the individual who posted the Universal Soldier...it needed to be said, again...and again, and again, The Left oh so loves soldiers....and anyone who pursues that story, or line of inquiry, must be called to the carpet. I can't believe IC didn't question it...instead he parroted his theory of abundance once again, even though it is repeatedly "off-topic." It perpetuates a mythos of the "good soldier." There are no "good soldiers," you morons. Soldiers kill for a living....often times, innocent people, or otherwise....but this soldier had different views...he really, really wanted to bag Osamma bin Bush. That says it all...yet the predictable Left wants to hold him up as their poster boy...how pathetic...and obvious...precisely why I don't consider myself a Lefty...among other things.

Jeff..there is a workaround for your OMNI babysitting routine. Wordpress overlapping the blog seems to have more controls and I don't know why blogger hasn't done something about these types of problems by now unless they are encouraging this behavior.

I'm surprised by your suggestion. The Gas Chambers won't always be used for the "Omni" types...whatever that means. If you help create, or sell, the chambers, they will one day be for you....or, perhaps, you already know that, and suggest it, nonetheless.

Maybe Tillman was axed on order from the Fuhrer (Bush). Note this interesting rub of who telegenic symbol Tillman was about to get involved in:

"You have to wonder ... why would the White House would invoke executive privilege in Tillman case?link to rawstory.com

""Usually presidents will cooperate," Turley said in dismay. "The Tillman case is a great example of that. It's unbelievably weak as an assertion, but the White House seems to be invoking executive privilege if anyone is within a 25 mile radius of the building. It's as clever and as elegant as a meat cleaver."...

...which would be the favorite weapon of the psychopath in the Oval Office.

Reminds me of the Wit of the Staircase interview with that activist priest that Jeff posted recently--talking about the desire of the military for complete "pre-emptive cultural control" through Cointelpro.

Even a whiff of a poor symbolic environment for the war corporation hucksters, and they circle the TV wagons and fire on everyone in sight.

Robot: One moment Will Robinson. I have a poem which should raise Dr. Smith's spirits. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall! Humpty Dumpty was two inches tall! He fell down down and broke his shell! Poor little egg I wish him well!

Dr. Smith: I think I'm going to be violently ill.

Will: C'mon Dr. Smith where's your sense of humor?

Robot: Personally I thought my poem very amusing. It is an original creation.

I've no idea if any of this is even remotely true. I learned long ago that my own gullibilty is too easily exploited for me to say one way or the other. My scepticism comes from buying spiels hook line & sinker in the past. I won't go into detail but I'll name some authors whose books I ate up with a spoon: Von Daniken, Berlitz, Castenada------the list could go on. I suppose I'm trying to say that I'm a piss poor judge of reality.

I just finished Chris O'Brien's book Mysterious Valley. Compelling stuff primarily because he doesn't appear to have a theory he's attempting to sell. He just reports the huge amount of anomalous shit happening in one tiny section of the world. He also does a good job of seeking primary source material and comparing that to published accounts. Unsurprisingly, to me anyway, there are always disparities between the two.He also doen't shy away from incidents that only appear anomalous due to poor detective work.

Are you familiar with Jaime Maussen & his documentation of the Mexican flap?

You can find one video here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1vIqu8cLVY

The religious symbolism is apparent & ties in quite nicely with what Vallee's been saying all along, given religions ancient role as a "cultural control" tool.Whether or not the asylum owners have hacked into that for their own ends is probably debatable.But I won't debate it.

These films presented by Mr. Maussen also resemble the Stratford sighting as well as the Mexican military footage shot in 2004.

Forgive me for back pedaling to an earlier post but you said this:

"I've known people who've had dead cats hung at their doorstep; who've been poisoned and burgled, and received death threats all because of the work they do and the privileged interests they challenge. I know they're not making shit up, because I know them. But if you didn't know them, to hear them talk sometimes, you might want to think they were."

See, that's my problem here, I don't know anyone who this has happened to. Again, my scepticism was born in the fertile fields of my own past gullibility. I used to take people at their word.I don't anymore.

While the account of your friend sounds legit, the internet is awash in claims of government harrassment that look exactly like the ramblings of paranoid schizophrenics.Just read Whispers;Voices of Paranoia by Ron Siegel or The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay or Memoirs of my Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber and see if you can tell the difference, because I can't.

The Air Loom Gang is particularly interesting because it details the story of James Tilly Matthews & his imagined "influencing machine" called the Air Loom. Long before technology made any of this remotely possible he was describing nefarious characters using magnetic rays to control his mind.

I suppose I'm just trying to glean your criteria for separating the bullshit from the truth, because I haven't been able to come up with one.

Which is why I file most of this in my huge 'Hmmmm...that's interesting" file.

Not that I'm dismissing folks claims. After all, if you were going to undertake an effort such as 'mind control,' what better way to do it than to mimic an existing & well documented mental disorder.&, given the proven existence of things like Hyper Sonic Sound, the techology, as they say, is there.

After all, didn't Ted Kaczynski take part in a study at Harvard "aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress?"

I suppose that since Mr. K., a promising genius, ended up paranoid in the wilderness mailing bombs to people, the "psychic deconstruction" he experienced was just an unrelated life anomaly rather than the culmination of another clinical success story.

I suppose that this what they mean by "blowback."

Although "blowback" has the air of the unintentional about it.

But hey, we all know this was just another crime due to cold war jitters, right?

They don't do that any more, do they?

Right?

We also know that the guv-ment wouldn't use this Executive Order

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-3.html

to silence Iraq War dissent.

Right?

So, the best I can muster about all this is complete & total confusion.

I'd say, same shit different day, but I just typed it so I don't have to.

I'm not quite sure how my abundance wagon got yoked to a press gang of patriotic soldiers cheered on by blind "lefties," but it'll all come out in the wash. It's late, so this is going to have to be short & sweet (yeah, I know, hardly my style, but necessity mothers strange inventions.)

As you know, the reason there is no appreciable difference between the two wings of the Party is that they both suckle the milk of corporate sponsorship. I could reprise the long list of "ifs" that would be required to reform the political sphere--ending corporate personhood, banning all private campaign financing, dismantling the national security apparatus, etc...for starters, but none of those ifs can occur when the legislators who could accomplish these things are bought & paid for by the interests they would be disenfranchising.

Obviously.

On the other hand, my tired old abundance platform could (and eventually will) obsolete the whole sick circus. The control wielded by the elite is not really the mountains of wealth they've stashed in their private banks: it's the needs we all have that can only be satisfied by complying with wage slavery.

If you lived in a house that produced more energy & water than it used, and this house was located in a community which grew all the food you needed, and your neighbors were free to acquire the skill sets needed to make the goods you used and to educate your children...

...and your community had the resources to reclaim the polluted land around you, restoring the watersheds, replanting the forests and building free universities...

...and bookshops and clinics and theaters...

...and laboratories dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the betterment of mankind and all the other creatures of the earth and the systems of which they're a part...

What would there be to hold over your head? What scarcity could be manufactured or manipulated to make you wage war or vote for the Proctoscope Party?

The only parties who would be jealous of your freedoms would be the ones you put out of business when you reclaimed your birthright. The same birthright that entitles your neighbors to the same resources you share.

Sure, you'd have to have courts to settle your differences, but many cultures have been doing this informally for thousands of years. And yeah, when someone decided to "purify the blood," you'd have to try to heal him or find a safe place for him to wrestle with his demons, but the incidence of these things would drop back down to what they were before the Empire bonded us all.

Pipedream? Well, it might sound "utopian" if you believe all the propaganda you've been fed all your life, but every single item on this list is doable right here & now, without any policy change, any public relations blitz.

The first list, the "ifs" of reform is the impossible dream. The second one is just a matter of rolling up your sleeves.

(This is what I meant, Wade--in case you've tuned in again--about energy actually being "worked around," just like all the other limitations we're sold.)

The only real difference betweenPat Tillman and the majority ofthe people who post on R.I. isthat Pat was,unfortunately,alreadyin harms way when he realized thatthe premise of this war is bogus and therefor the war itself is bogus.He paid for his moment ofenlightenment with his life. All we can do for Pat, and all theothers like him, is to keep theheat on the murdering scum whotook his life to further there owntwisted ambitions.

I'd imagine those gents coming through the windows in the above film clip from Brazil were probably neck deep in their own desires for college tuition or a way out of their own personal dead ends, but hey, orders is orders.

I've come to regard Scientology as a kind of "limited hangout". Much of what they say about psychiatry is actually true. There is no proof that "chemical imbalances" exist, many prominent Nazis were shrinks, and psychiatry do serve to disenfranchise many of society's most vulnerable members. But if you put that critique in the mouthpiece of a whack-job Scientologist like Tom Cruise no one takes it seriously....

Similarly, Scientology's sheer goofiness makes it an ideal cover for all kinds of political-occult witchcraft like remote viewing... Its interesting, compared to the Temple of Set Scientolgy looks like a bad infomercial. The Set website, on the other hand, is positively creepy....

Shrubbery – it’s a good thing I didn’t read this last night cuz I was daaaaaa-runk (it’s a necessary evil when “happy hour” with co-workers equals spending valuable free time with attorneys). If I had, I more than likely, would have proposed internet marriage!

You know, I’ve had a lot of people (in my real ‘ether free’ life) ask me how I have succeeded not only in being Prozac free but truly happy despite the “Rigorous” circumstances. I usually just giggle and say ‘I dunno’ but that’s a lie. I know exactly why I spill love all over this sometimes blog of despair. It’s because this blog…Jeff and all of the alumni [you know who you are – and if I may humbly render a compliment to each of you – you guys are waaaaaaaaaay :) smarter than me] are about truth. And no matter how ugly the truth can be sometimes, it always leads to love. And occasionally, along the way, you find some really good humor.

And even if you’re not corny and sentimental like me….you gotta admit – there’s nothing better than a little good humor:

Which part are you kidding about--that you used to support the troops or that the economic incentives bought the butchery tools? I can't imagine the former, while the latter strikes me as a bit too, well, socialist for your tastes. I mean, everyone knows that rich kids and football stars don't join up (unless they actually believed they crap they were told.)

That's kind of strange, too, when you follow that logical train. Was the Leader really smarter than Pat the Martyr? Or did he come by his deferments the old-fashioned way, like his avuncular Dicks?

No one is any smarter than you if you've found that truth, regardless of the path you took. Look at poor old Douglas Adams--he loved us so much that when the Margretheans put Earth II together and they asked Arthur if he'd like anything changed before they hit the "intialize life sequence" button, he thought about all the things that were wrong and said, "No, they'll figure it out."

Wade said the same thing here yesterday (?) on the last thread, and he's someone who should know.

Levity is the true opposite of gravity, but contrary to popular belief, only the good guys die laughing.

Then I wander around my limited world & chat with people & realize how unrealistic it all is & then I'm cured for another few months.

If this confuses you, imagine how I feel being stuck living with me 24/7.

In todays iconic world where the symbol matters more than the reality, does "smarter" have any meaning whatsoever.

In the days following 911 GW was as heroic as any "real" warrior wasn't he?

Even the Rev. B. Graham, the "man-of-God" chosen to memorialize the 911 dead, was just playing a "man-of-God" in the 911 TV movie we all were supposed to watch & mourn to.

In "reality" he's a shady con man who has sold God like a businesman sells widgets with his army of 6000 shills who precede his crusades into American cities, jumping up when called to flummox the masses into believing in such things as "spontaneous" out-pourings of God love.

How fitting, a fake preacher leading genuine mourning about a fake terrorist attack.

Much like Dick, a fake warrior, cheerleading "real" warriors into a fake war.

So, is my stance more or less confusing now?

Your answer is not mandatory.

Maybe I just like to argue.

Only my wife knows for sure.

I don't think that I actually "believe" in anything.

Belief implies a leap of faith, & faith is just something I don't have.

You & others have hammered me into a square materialist hole of your own creations.

But Richard, don't you get it? You don't have your own blog, and you haven't written extensively on issues which are, when it's all said and done, just wind. Take note of IC's sychophancy on the last thread in welcoming this Wade guy. Lennin required his ass be kissed as much as any Capitalist Pig....so it's really no different with the Socialists. I'm convinced that ass kissing is a disease for which there is no cure.

That's one of the reasons I respect you, Richard. You say it like it is and you don't kiss ass....not because you want to be a hard ass...but because ass kissing is so god damned absurd and disgusting....unless it's Eve's ass we're talking about......then it's a wonderful thing.

Boy Shrub, I'm glad you stuck in that last part.There are definitely some asses, amongst other body parts, I would most definitely kiss, & kiss with much gusto.

I'm not looking to start another argument with IC.His idea about the self sufficient solar home is just tits with me.

Now if he could explain how someone like me, who's working 65/70 hours a week and barely making ends meet, could possibly afford a roof full of solar panels let alone find the time to install them, I'd hop on board.

I suppose, since my house is paid off, I could take another mortgage, but I'm not sure, after I default on a mortgage payment I couldn't possibly afford, how the new owners would feel about being disconnected from the enery grid.

"Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, said yesterday that more borrowers with good credit were falling behind on their loans and that the housing market might not begin recovering until 2009 because of a decline in house prices that goes beyond anything experienced in decades.

The news from Countrywide, widely seen as a bellwether for the mortgage market, initiated a sell-off in the stock market, which is at its most volatile in more than a year. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 30.53 points, or 2 percent, to 1,511.04, its biggest one-day drop in nearly five months. The dollar dropped to a new low against the euro, edging closer to $1.40 to 1 euro. Stocks opened sharply lower in Japan this morning.

The slumping housing market has become the biggest worry for the stock market, which just four days ago set records, because of its potential impact on the broader economy and financial system.

Countrywide’s stark assessment signaled a critical change in the substance and tenor of how housing executives are publicly describing the market. Just a couple of months ago, some executives were predicting a relatively quick recovery and saying that most home loans would be fine with the exception of those made to borrowers with weak credit who stretched too far financially.

Executives at Countrywide had for some time been more skeptical than others but the bluntness of their comments yesterday surprised many on Wall Street. In a conference call with analysts that lasted three hours, Countrywide’s chairman and chief executive, Angelo R. Mozilo, said home prices were falling “almost like never before, with the exception of the Great Depression.”"

Further proof that what passes for journalism & free discourse & academia in this dipshit country of ours is little more than the babblings of lunatics.

"In the advertising world, brand identity is everything. Volvo means safety. Colgate means clean. IPod means cool. But since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, its "show of force" brand has proved to have limited appeal to Iraqi consumers, according to a recent study commissioned by the U.S. military.

The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves "shaping" both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of "Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation." The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.

A Rand Corp. report commissioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command provides examples of how misinterpreted images have damaged the U.S. government's credibility in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations.

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the "force" brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been "We will help you." That is what President Bush's new Iraq strategy is striving for as it focuses on establishing a protective U.S. troop presence in Baghdad neighborhoods, training Iraq's security forces, and encouraging the central and local governments to take the lead in making things better."

Belief implies a leap of faith, & faith is just something I don't have.

You & others have hammered me into a square materialist hole of your own creations.

I just play along entirely for my own amusement.

I suppose you're right about all of the above, including our pigeon-holing of your outlook.

I'm reminded very much of the internal struggle that one of my favorite sci-fi guys plays out through his charachters. He's Ken MacLeod, and I've been mentioning him a bit of late. Label-wise, he's a leading light of the Scottish independence movement, an anarcho-communist who embraces RAW's Guns & Dope platform...and also a guy who is cynical enough to mistrust the Greens and doubt the possibility of an unsubverted socialist revolution.

When I contacted him last with an eye toward selling him on my notions of autonomy through design, he was even gracious enough to say, "Okay, pal, you're obviously as nutty as they come, but I'll listen" (figuratively, of course), which is a damned sight more than that pompous capitalist swine Brin will do.

The thing that I can't quite seem to get across anywhere--except among those who've already grasped Bucky's view of ephemeralization & abundance, a counterintuitiive exercise if ever there was--is that having all our needs satisfied before we go about talking about setting up a politcal framework changes the assumptions upon which any such framework is established.

Of course, if we had that level of freedom from want--real security, as opposed the kind we think we're getting with battleships--we wouldn't much need any sort of government at all. I'm not sure which idea people are more suspicious about--that we could rebuild without hierarchies & hegemonies, or the very notion of being so free as to be unbounded by convention.

That was always the acid test of the Acid Tests that I remenber: 1/3rd were too scared to let go (which made for a very unpleasnt experience); another third just sort of hung on for the ride, knowing it would end eventually; and the final third were so willing to embrace whatever might happen that they were invariably unhappy when their feet stopped floating.

Okay, maybe the hallucination analogy is fraught with other meanings, but you see what I mean here...and now.

Shrub,

Whad up? I don't mind the aspersions--why should I?--but how come you have to go that route instead of responding to the the answers I gave to the questions you asked? If you took the time to read what I said to Wade, you'd realize that neither of us was engaging in any of that anal greeting business to which you so happily alude.

Not that I'm interested in slinging any feces with you, Laddie, but this is sort of the problem with your style of dialogue. Instead of talking through the ideas, you resort to emotional shortcuts, which is fine, if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes you even do it with a bit of wit...but you still don't answer questions that make you uncomfortable.

Not that I mind, of course. It takes all kinds. I'm sure that in the balance of things you've contributed just as much to the sum total of our understanding as Wade has. Any chance that you might put the accumulated wisdom of Shrub on a web page we can all quote?

Richard,

I didn't say it would be easy, but if you're really interested, sure, I could tell you how.

"On the other hand, my tired old abundance platform could (and eventually will) obsolete the whole sick circus. The control wielded by the elite is not really the mountains of wealth they've stashed in their private banks: it's the needs we all have that can only be satisfied by complying with wage slavery."...

and later

"...an eye toward...notions of autonomy through design,....The thing that I can't quite seem to get across anywhere--except among those who've already grasped Bucky's view of ephemeralization & abundance, a counterintuitive exercise if ever there was--is that having all our needs satisfied before we go about talking about setting up a political framework changes the assumptions upon which any such framework is established.

Of course, if we had that level of freedom from want--real security, as opposed the kind we think we're getting with battleships--we wouldn't much need any sort of government at all. I'm not sure which idea people are more suspicious about--that we could rebuild without hierarchies & hegemonies, or the very notion of being so free as to be unbounded by convention."

Anyone who follows this argument will like this book how the supposed 'free market' guys of the late 1700s were the most state interventionist guys on the block.

Their intent was to do exactly what IC talks about: to remove forms of economic independence. And instead of using 'markets' as a means toward creating captive clientelism , they exclusively recommended using the state (and not 'economics') to force people into penury and dependence to do it.

"Economics" didn't create the world we have. It was a biased use of the state to destroy economic independence. And from the state they still do this to the present increasingly worldwide, on these principles of demoting autonomy toward Empire clientelism.

Drawing of course exclusively from England is a typical difficulty of books like this, though it was in England that these 'do as I say not as i do' ideas were first acted out:

"The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others--created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this?

Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor.

To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the [state] control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical [i.e., British anti-autonomy] economists.

He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real [far more political] intentions and goals of classical political economy--to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land.

This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism [sic, state interventionism for private jurisdiction to destroy local autonomy] to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism [and show "it ain't capitalism or wealth you're fighting, it's state corporatism of cronies that design policies to keep people clientelistic] took hold in the industrial age [which is not so different from the preceding (and continuing) aristocratic state and estate management age]."

Glad to hear that Richard. I really meant what I said in my very first blog page about the importance of imagination to our future and the special role of the imagineers (speculative fiction, sci-fi, and to some extent fantasy writers.) I have hundreds of favorites, but maybe this post from the discussion board will be enough for now. (The recommendations are by author, way down near the bottom, I think.)

I have a few specific titles offhand I could give you as well, such as John C. Wright, the rational materialist who writes kick-ass sci-fi and fantasy, like THE GOLDEN AGE TRILOGY. Wright's The Last Guardian of Everness its sequel, Mists of Everness talk, in an eerie allegory, about how our congress has been possessed by strange entities.

As if...

Shrub,

Don't be mad--I didn't mean to insult you. I should have let your insinuations slide...but I like your little persona here (usually), so when you start talking about what an ass-kisser I am, well...you got my goat. What can I say? (You can keep it, if you like.)

Mark,

Speaking of sci-fi, have you ever read MacLeod? I believe he's familiar with your stuff (from me, if nowhere else), and I think you might really like his writing, too. Just a thought.

Jeff,

At the risk of yet further of ass-kissing, I didn't mean to imply that contemporary fiction wasn't important to the world-mind. I did force my library to buy Anxious Gravity, you know...got a link for the new one?

I like you....I have said that before, and I said it again, but I don't feel you are beyond reproach, and I don't think you shouldn't be challenged. Something motivates me to bring you back down to earth and solicit a more personal response from you. I'm not sure from where that motivation emanates, but it is compelling.

IC, you do have a habit of sticking to your message regardless of the topic introduced by Jeff. It's a wonderful message...but it doesn't always apply to the topic at hand, yet you attempt to shoe horn it in somehow. That was the reason for my sarcasm.....there is truth behind what I said.

Note that I in no way indicated that your contribution in life was any more or less than anyone elses. The fact that you implied that my contribution in life is less worthwhile than say a Wade Frazier's reveals something about your character that is...let's say, lacking.

You do provide invaluable information and incredible insight into some of the most salient issues confronting mankind...and I appreciate that about you, but you also seem to have a difficult time switching gears from "teaching" to listening and sharing your personal self.

You mention that I never answer questions or avoid them. I wasn't aware that I did that. I have a limited amount of time to read and post here, so I choose to mostly read and respond every now and then as the mood arises. Additionally, since when do you "really" ask questions? In my experience with you, your questions aren't really questions at all..instead they are statements disguised as questions. Your queries don't require a response...they are merely to prove your point.

In regards to the ass kissing comment, I call it like I see it. I can't stand hierarchy and idol worship and the cult of celebrity...so when I see what I believe to be the manifestation of that on a blog that is constructed to purportedly question and critique the status quo, I'm going to poiny out it's a contradictory foul.

You and I have one fundamental disagreement, and that is the probability of the ingrates adopting your methods. That has been our major difference from the beginning...otherwise, I dig your message.

Once again, I like you, IC, and I respect you, but you are nothing more than my equal and your contribution to whatever you believe you are contributing to is not only irrelevant, it can't be measured effectively due to subjective perception of those doing the measuring. A self-described Righty would say your contribution to humanity, or whatever it is you believe you are contributing to, is negative...so it is in the eyes of the beholder...which makes it a silly notion to espouse.

NBC is reporting that an Armydoctor, who conducted the autopsyof Pat Tillman, wrote in his reportthat Tillman had been shot "in theforehead with three rounds froman M16. The three rounds wereclustered in an area no more thanthree inches in diameter".

Jeeez... It that was a case of "friendly " fire I'd hate to see a case of un-friendly fire....

I never wore a yellow ribbon& I've bled for this countryno flag eitheror "WELCOME HOME HEROES" bumper sticker on my carI can't find one good thing to sayabout American teen-agers firing extremely high-tech weaponryagainst a virtually unarmed enemyA parade for our heroes?A parade for death?What was the body count anyway?How many Iraqi children died with our metal in their bones?I'm not going to make a nineteen year old kid a herofor having the innocence to killI have two Purple Hearts myselffor being young & stupid& that is not an excuseto fill a coffin

I can see where you would have gotten the idea that I denigrated the contributions you make from my angry response. But let's not forget that it was an angry response.

Dude, you called me an ass-kissing sychophant because I was so excited that Wade had found his way here. That's ridiculous. If you look at what we had to say to one another, you'll see that I disagreed with the main premise of his work. This is not groveling.

When I've made contact with people whose ideas I like, I don't put them on some sort of pedestal; I act just as you say you do. I call it like I see it. I might do so respectfully, but I am, if nothing else, honest.

When I criticized Ben Bova over what I perceived as the comic book characterization of good guys & bad guys in one of his recent books, his webmaster tried to insulate the grand old man of sci-fi from my rude remarks. Ben, however, stepped out from behind his shield and sat down to have a very frank conversation with me.

We ended up agreeing to disagree, but my respect for the man went up considerably after that exchange. As you know, things didn't work out so well in my conversations with Mr. Brin, for lots of different reasons, but mostly because I found his politics reptilian. On the personal side of things, yeah, he was an arse, but I didn't really care about that.

Now this might come as a bit of a shock to you, but I'm a firm believer in egalitarianism. Sure, there are any number of people who are unfathomably smarter than I am, but that doesn't mean that I can't or shouldn't try to talk about their ideas.

I have no respect fot this cult of personality you mention. The fact that I do have a great deal of respect for certain people does not contradict this position at all. I was even willing to give Omni the benefit of the doubt--remember?

As I've recently tried to explain, I don't really think anyone has ever had an original thought, least of me. We're simply resonators. Things (ideas, patterns, memes, if you like) sometimes strike chords within us, and then we turn around and tell the world what we've seen. The so-called "great men" have just been gifted, or maybe highly sensitive receivers.

As to the idea of us here at RI contributing anything to human understanding, well, I don't see it at all. Maybe Jeff--he has a knack for sensing patterns that indicates a certain level of sensitivity. And maybe Mark, who was able to translate what he saw into a very good guide to the Reconstruction (Toward a Bioregional State). Starroute had a very unique mind as well, so I suppose we could put her in that tentative column.

As for the rest of us, all that we contribute to is the conversation here. I know for a fact that every idea I've ever described here is something I read somewhere else.

There is no competition.

I've already apologized for my outburst toward you, Shrub, but that doesn't mean you weren't dead wrong about what you said.

You do have a point about my alternate universe perspective bleeding into so much of my thoughts here, and for that I also apologize. The idea is just so much bigger than I am that I can't help but consider most of what's wrong as a function of the manipulation of scarcity.

...No wonder there is talk of austerity and apocalypse. Who can be cheerful or encouraged about any of this?

I believe there is an austerity all right, but it is an austerity of imagination. All of it is fueled by the premise of scarcity in nature.

and:

When we admit to scarcity, we create economic and social and political conditions that allow some to have and many to go without.

Not only does this understanding provide a way forward--through embracing and working out the mechanics of the forbidden abundance--but it also explains why and how things have got to the point they're at.

If you look back over all the things I've written here, however, you'll see that this perspective does not inform everything I write. It might seem that way, since you've heard it so many times before, but if you go back even through this past week, you'll see that this is not the case.

Not that I don't appreciate the criticism, mind you. It was honest and had a certain validity. Unlike that other stuff.

So there.

How are you and Eve doing in the garden phase of your relationship, btw? I hear the apples are good.

Stan Goff spent time investigating, with the Tillman family, Pat's death and the coverup surrounding it. His excellent "The Tillman Files" can be found here:

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/the_tillman_files.shtml

This is what he had to say on his blog about the latest news:

Two of the top gunshot specialists in forensic pathology in the nation agree with me that this was likely a squad automatic weapon (same caliber as an M-4). The army dummied up the distances, then drew them down to 85 meters to support a “fog of war” thesis (as opposed to the actual serial violations of the ROE that did occur… more likely at around 40 meters. The three shots that killed Pat were actually two tight, and one flyer, all head shots and each instantly fatal on its own account. Now think in slow motion. Let me begin with the terminal ballistics one never sees in films and on tv. Destruction of the connection between the brain stem and the rest of the body caused a body to fall… straight down. No, people do not fly through the air like the stunt-people in Hollywood. Straight down. This happens instantly. The new theory proposed by some so-called expert, says that this tight shot-group (less than 4 inches) could only have been fired by someone shooting on semi-automatic (one shot at a time, even if in rapid succession). A fully-automatic weapon, like the Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) that is presumed (by me and two of the top forensics experts in the country) to be the lethal weapon, according to this theory, cannot fire this shot group because automatic weapons can not be controlled for this tight a shot-group. This premise is the basis of the presumed distance (10 meters) and mode of fire (semi-auto)/weapon (M-4) in the new AP-propogated theory. Two problems: (1) the theory about auto fire is wrong, and (2) Pat was shot in the face three times, while facing downhill, and standing on a steep incline dropping to his front. (2) first. For this to have been an M-4 firing on semi, the shooter would have had to fire, reacquire, fire, reaquire, and fire again, before Pat fell to the ground (straight down, on a steep forward inclining piece of terrain, with a large stone in front of him to prevent him tumbling down the hill). Even a very good rapid-fire shooter could not have place all three shots together quickly enough to fire the second and third shots before Pat fell away from the sight alignment. The only 5.56 mm weapon that could have placed those shots that quickly in the same place was the SAW… cyclic rate of auto-fire: 850 rounds per minute (14 rounds per second, ergo, three rounds in 2/10 of a second). Physics and physiology matter; now add on the statistical probability that a bunch of enlisted people would willingly participate as accessories after the fact in a cold-blooded murder (that just happened to coincide with an unplanned (but ineffectual) ambush)… and we begin to appreciate how unlikely this scenario is. Now for number (1). I’ll happily go to the range with anyone who cares to set it up today (which can be arranged with anyone who has been trained with the SAW), and demonstrate that these tight groups very well can be fired from a Saw, when they are part of a continuous firing cycle that allows the gunner to first walk the fire onto a target, then tighten down on the weapon as he orients on the impact signature (The rock in front of Pat was covered with bullet strikes.). There are family members who will not easily dismiss this because they are not experts on these things, and because the government has lied and covered up again and again and again on this case. I don’t fault them; and in fact I have great affection for them. The depth of their sense of betrayal would make anyone think the worst, and want someone to prove otherwise. More than this, I am not willing to say because I am still under a confidentiality agreement. Let me say this, though. If this case becomes about a conspiracy to murder, the focus is taken off the likely suspects for the real cover-up and crime, and the ones who all these sacrifices of Generals have been designed to protect… Donald Rumsfeld, Lawrence DeRita, and probably George W. Bush. They are all loving this right now.

Didn't you get the memo? We don't eat apples anymore. Apples are notorious for two things - talking snakes and keeping the doctor away. We like playing doctor so we're eating pears now...it's all about pears. Naked pears for naked pairs.

The point you bring up is very good and offers a FAR better explanation for Iraq for instance than to say "We're after the oil". BUT, and its a big but, your conclusions are..

..

lets say not well thought out (thats as kind as I can be)

"Economics" didn't create the world we have. It was a biased use of the state to destroy economic independence. And from the state they still do this to the present increasingly worldwide, on these principles of demoting autonomy toward Empire clientelism.

What is "Empire" but the most complete and heinous merger of all of the preeminent capitalist actors? (nation states, financial institutions, multinational corps, etc)

To say economics has nothing to do with it is the mark of someone much too pleased with his own "daring" and out-side-the-box insights. What is economics but a reflection of the scarcity IC (reputedly *wink*) rails against every post?

I understand there are all sorts of shadowy undercurrents in Leftist politics, both historically and most certainly currently. I will even concede the Left in its present form is not the "answer". And by Left I mean anything BUT modern liberalism, we all know that is for the dogs..

What I have a hard time swallowing is someone who is barely versed in it at all -- based on the underlying premise that its all a secret covert operation designed as a honeypot or worse (or some such line of thought) -- making all sorts of pregnant comments that manage to take triteness and biting superficiality to new heights.

What does saying "its not about economics" mean? A repudiation of Marxism? You can spare yourself the effort..unless you know more Marxists than I do. Sorry but tepid conspiracy theories that amount to fantastic horseshit are well and good, but they don't cut it if we're talking for real. If you want to talk about how Marx was a plagiarist go for it. But, shockingly (or not), if I were to asked you about the significance of Das Kapital -- as a work of economics and social science -- I'd no doubt get more two-bit dithering that says jack shit.

Listen, your comprehensive study of Bioregionalism is a very good resource, but you do way too much cherry-picking on other topics for someone who's knowledge base of said topics screams "dilettante" (of convenience)

I'm sorry to be so blunt and harsh on this but you took an excellent insight that is worth recognizing and exploring some more and morphed it into a giant high-calorie no-nutrient shit sandwich.

Colonialism is not consistent with or somehow transcends economics/capitalism? Give me a fucking break, dude. Even the asshole of a ghoul like Kissinger isn't clenched tight enough to seriuously make that claim.

You and I have one fundamental disagreement, and that is the probability of the ingrates adopting your methods. That has been our major difference from the beginning...otherwise, I dig your message.

There is a difference between disagreeing and being disagreeable. One of ICs book links in the last couple of posts -- I forget the name but its the Trilogy one -- applauds the author for writing about the far-flung future without simply projecting the Roman Empire onto it.

This, plus a healthy does of self-indulgent cynicism -- is your real "disagreement". NO ONE disagrees that the task before us is daunting, impossible under our current assumptions even.

And thats the point -- those assumputions are wrong. Not being they have to be or else we'd all be full of shit so therefore they just "are" either. A serious, sober look into history -- its trends and movements and the actors who played it out -- makes that explicitly clear. Dwelling on the slovenly nature of everyone you see around you on a day-to-day basis, not so much.

Look, its not conspiracy theory to say that 99.9% of everyday Americans are know-nothings. Or even to say they're conditioned to be that way. If Omni ever writes that opus of his -- to be titled Shit Floats -- it'd be applicable for all of the above.

Your neat little vicious cycle goes like this: everyone is a know-nothing and/or an apathetic so there is nothing we can do to bring down the system that produces our Lemming population. George Bush has a better chance of successfully extricating us from Iraq than anyone has of getting out of that mental quagmire.

And since it also happens to be false, I think its say to call it an unconstructive viewpoint and suggest we approach the problem from other angles.

To which you reply by conflating things that have nothing to do with each other, really. To you, appealing to any human quality other than stupidity, greed/lust, or brain-dead convenience is some sort of "romanticization" and also signifies that we are all Michael Dukakis "I'm against the Death Penalty" girlie-men with a heapin' helpin' of head-in-the clouds idealism on top.

No one is suggesting that the proper response to being held up is to hug the assailant. Or that the violent element of society is going to be turned around if we can just give them the love they never had.

You can see the two are not connected: Faith that humanity can achieve an egalitarian society does not equate to an equal faith that everybody is nicey-nice in the here and now. In fact the opposite -- if that were true wouldn't we be here debating the gentle tweaks and nudges needed for the continuing betterment of some preexisting Dream Society?

Most suicide bombers in Iraq aren't Islamic radicals, they are commonplace citizens who want an end to the occupation. What does that tell you about human nature? It gives you way more insight than snorting at some blithering dickhead who gets kicks by tearing out of redlights in his pickup truck ever will.

applauds the author for writing about the far-flung future without simply projecting the Roman Empire onto it.

I wonder if the same applause was awarded a writer during Roman Times writing about the future....but here we are, 2,000 years later, and the Roman Influence is still as as strong as ever.

As we all know here, though, it's not just the Roman Empire that was, and is the problem, but it is the human relational construct called Civilization that is the problem.

Is it possible to carry out IC's dream considering the paralyzing grip the paradigm of Civilization has on its subjects? I will concede that it is possible...but not probable. More probable is a new form of social interaction and arrangement following a calamitous event...should we survive such an event.

That's not being disagreeable, as you say...it is simply disagreeing. Your terminology is both dismissive and marginalizing.

And another thing...please refrain from presumptuously assuming that the comments section of this blog has a specific purpose and if an individual's comments aren't in alignment with said presumed purpose, then that individual's comments are unconstructive and disagreeable. The comments section of this blog is not contained by your notion, or IC's notion, of what you presume it to be. It is more than you and IC, and your presumptuous parameters. It is a wonderful, free flow exchange of thoughts, ideas and feelings....yes feelings...let's not forget that, as is so often the case with intellectual erudition.

Owlindaylight, Thanks for the infothat you supplied in your postregarding the wounds to Pat Tillman.I'm going to have to disagreewith Stan Goff though on hisassertion that if Tillman's deathis reclassified as a case of outand out murder, that it would take"the focus off" Rumsfeld, DeRita,and Bush. In fact I think it wouldbe just the opposite. Any orderthat was given to kill Tillmanfor his burgeoning anti-war stance,as reflected in his letters andemails, would have to come rightfrom the top. Meaning Rumsfeld.Would it be possible for Rumsfeldto keep Bush out of the loop regarding any decision to murderTillman? Possible, but unlikely.Just as Libbey took the hit forCheney in Plamegate, certain Generals will most likely take the hit for Rumsfeld and Bush. But thepublic at large will know who gavethe order to murder Pat Tillman.

Jeff, Congrats on your blog for winning a "Thinking BloggerAward". Perhaps Red Tory willforward a small cash prize and agold plated cerebellum? Or, maybenot. Red Tory? I didn't knowthey had stand up comics in the1700's.Anyway..I will toast your extremelyworthy victory Jeff with severalice cold "Bombay" martinis later onwith friends,as I regal them withyour tales of all that is not rightwith the world.

You know, perspective really is everything. I just surfaced from dashing my brains out against the rock of some skeptic's skull down in the basement where Jeff keeps the discussion board. Not that I'm disparaging you lot down there--the format is infinitely better and you can post images! The boarders are also a different lot altogether: I can't quite put my finger on it, but they seem both more focused and less easily swayed by rhetoric & emotion somehow. Anyway, if any of you would like to see how the skeptics deal with the likes of us, creep down there quietly. Shelob's sleeping.

acl,

Did you happen to catch this link on Wheen's revolutionary biography of Marx? Sorry about the pun, but Eve's pair have given me one, by osmosis (and Shakespeare's shameless example. Now that's convoluted!)

Shrub,

Point taken...but why do you keep having to talk about my role here? I really don't have anything more important to say than anyone else. Those really aren't my ideas. Please, Shrub--let me be just another serf. (Smurfs are too scary for me; I won't let my kids watch them anymore, not since I inadvertantly caught some sort of smurf pornography on one of those "humorous video" websites.)

Oh, yeah. One more link for everyone. It's from guy named Engdahl who's talking about how the ethanol conspiracy is about to go soylent green on us. I read it and it sounds believable enough, although I'm not a very rigorous skeptic, of course.

Since most of my friends are directlyrelated to the Crown heads of Europe,there is no need to "regal" them,however I still fully intend toregale them with the wild and wickedstories from this esteemed awardwinning blog!

Whoa, acl. I hit a hot button there I guess. Ask for clarification before casting the first stone. You imputed that when I said--as just a short little intro to someone else's book of all things:

Economics" didn't create the world we have.

To take it to mean it had nothing to do with anything.

Of course it does. I'm more holistically inclined, than to say something like you took it to mean. More appropriate would have been "Economics alone (or politically undirected economics) didn't create the world we have."

And that interesting book shows exactly what was on the minds of many 'classical economists'--forced clientelism--who were not economists at heart (in the way we have come to understand it) and were elaborating intellectual justifications for public state intervention for the 'private sector.' This failed to stop, and is a continuing state-interventionist theme into others, Perelman notes.

While Steuart (1767:151) taught that slavery was a "violent method (for) making men laborious in raising food," he understood that the market, properly arranged, could accomplish the same objectives that Spartan slavery promised. In the past, he argued, "men were...forced to labour because they were slaves to others; men are now forced to labour because they are slaves to their own wants." (ibid., 1:52)

[Which, note, was only what IC was saying above.]

Continues:

"What did Steuart mean by "wants"? he wrote, "Those who become servants for the sake of food, will soon become slaves." (ibid, 1:28). Thus although wage earners, unlike slaves, are formally free, Steuart understood that workers would be subject to an increasingly strict discipline. In this sense, capitalism seemed to be the next best alternative to a slave society.

"Although no other classical economist would have been so blunt, this idea was not unique to Steuart. For example, Mirabeau [assuredly an Illuminatus, by the way, though one that endlessly changed sides], whose work differed from that of Steuart in many respects (see Chamley 1965; 73 ff.), exclaimed, "The whole magic of [a] well-ordered society is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself" (Mirabeau, Philosophie Rurale, cited in Meek 1963, 70). Cantillion's analysis of how feudalism and the market could lead to the same outcome offered an even closer parallel.

"Steuart (1767, 2:217) realized that the market had many advantages over the crude spartan system [of slavery], but he also understood that it could run amok. In his words, "The Lacedemonian form may be compared to the wedge....Those of the modern states to watches, which are continually going wrong [in doing the same thing of creating a slave society being more complicated.]"

"As a result Steuart ['the economist'] looked to a statesman to guide the system [for the GOALS mentioned above]. This perspective led him to focus his attention on one overridding question: How were wants to be structured so that they would effectively enslave people?

"Here we come to the heart of Steuart's work. Steuart found himself in a land where labor had not yet been fully subjugated to the needs of capital. His agricultural experience was well suited to equip him to become the theorist par excellence of primitive accumulation. He knew that the traditional Highlanders had wants, but they were not yet "slaves" to them in the sense that Steuart used the term. In responding to this situation [of opposition to actual free, economically independent areas of a state], Steuart went further than any other classical political economist in trying to develop a program to integrate the traditional [independent] sector into the economy.

"Steuart and The Organizing of Economic Development

"Steuart (ibid, 2:80) clearly connected his desire to purge the land of free hands, as well as his antagonism toward subsistence farming, with the rise of commodity production:....Steuart realized that merely throwing people off the land would not necessarily lay the path for a smooth transition to capitalist [state] social relations. He recognized the complexity....

"Unlike other classical political economists [or 'shock therapy' economic terrorism by the World Bank or IMF of our current neocon era], Steuart [preferred the slow boil of a frog instead of throwing it into the boiling water all at once, and] stressed that one cannot overlook the tempo at which changes are introduced...."Sudden revolutions are constantly hurtful, and a good statesman ought to lay down his plan for arriving at perfection [sic, meaning unknown, un-sensed slavery] by gradual steps."

"A second consideration was more substantial. Steuart knew full well that although the Scottish gentry was able to throw masses of people off the land, eviction alone was not sufficient to force people into wage labor. Time and time again, Steuart (ibid., 1:8, 29, 237) repeated that the crus of his investigation was to discover how people came to submit voluntarily to authority."

Stone Perelman if you want, though he's not arguing what you assumed either.

If anyone you'd have to stone Steuart for starting the whole two-faced idea rolling.

The more fascinating and perhaps "RI-related" thing about Steuart was that he was a high political Jacobite against the Hanoverians, and thus connected to high level Continental Masonry as well as all the many attempts of the Stewarts to gain back their throne in England between 1688-1745 or so:

Sir James Denham-Steuart, 7th Baronet (21 October 1712 – 26 November 1780) was a British economist.

He was the only son of Sir James Steuart, Solicitor General for Scotland under [last Stewart line] Queen Anne and [first Hanoverian line] George I, and was born at Edinburgh. After passing through the University of Edinburgh he was admitted to the Scottish bar at the age of twenty-four. [Her Majesty's Solicitor General for Scotland (Àrd-neach-lagha a' Chrùin an Alba) is one of the Law Officers of the Crown, and the deputy of the Lord Advocate, whose duty is to advise the Crown and the Scottish Executive on Scots Law. They are also responsible for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service which together constitute the Criminal Prosecution Service in Scotland. Until 1999, when the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive were created, the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General for Scotland advised the United Kingdom Government.]

[The son of this guy] then spent some years on the Continent, and while in Rome entered into relations with the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart. He was in Edinburgh in 1745, and so compromised himself that, after the battle of Culloden, he found it necessary to return to the Continent, where he remained until 1763. It was not indeed until 1771 he was fully pardoned for any complicity he may have had in the rebellion. He died at his family seat, Coltness, in Lanarkshire.

In 1767 was published Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. It was the most complete and systematic survey of the science from the point of view of moderate mercantilism [moderate? says Loboto-pedia] which had appeared in England."

The rest of the Wikiarticle is pretty empty and even misleading, though at least it does mention that Adam Smith and Steuart were close conversational companions.

I had my own little bout of what was probably just paranoia about this sort of thing some six months when every link I posted seemed to go dormant within 48 hours. It's one of the reasons I halted work on my link project. Strangely enough, when I started talking about what was happening...it suddenly stopped happening.

I know this isn't exactly scientific, but on the other hand, one of my friends in Oz tells me that everytime people would follow mylinks from here to his site, his tracking system recorded IPs in Langely and the VP's office following them over. What in the world would we have to say that's of interest to those types?

Did you read that ethanol/food price thing, Dr. Bombay? It was always my impression that a gallon of ethanol took at least that much petrol to produce...yet another swindle. Oh, wait, I keep forgetting! I wonder if it's disqualifiable purely on account of its CT conclusion:

In the mid-1970's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions stated, “Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people.” The same cast of characters who brought the world the Iraq war, the global scramble to control oil, who brought us patented genetically manipulated seeds and now Terminator suicide seeds, and who cry about the “problem of world over-population,” are now backing conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for thought. As the popular saying goes, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.”

I.C. Yes, I did read that article.My knowledge of bio-fuels is quitelimited and that's why I'm gratefulto have someone like yourself toturn to when I want the straightdope. It seems to me however thatBURNING anything, with perhaps theexception of hydrogen, is a deadend for our energy needs. I havementioned this before but there is a company located in Norwood, Mass.who claims to have perfected adevice that is able to draw voltagefrom trees. It seems that all treeshave a constant charge of 12 voltsrunning through them. The theoryis the trees are drawing the energydirectly from the earths magneticfield. This means, according to thecompany, that their device wouldallow you to come home from workand plug your electric car into anytree on your property to recharge.Further the company has found thatthe trees maintain a constant 12volts regardless of how many of their devices are plugged into thetree itself. The article detailingthe company's device was in theProvidence Journal sometime backin February. I misplaced the article during a recent move andI'm not into paying a fee to accessthe web archives of the ProJo.However, the Prov. Public Libraryarchives should have a digitalfile of that newspaper and I willtry an make an effort to track itdown and get the name of the company in the next couple of days.

Please do try to find that article--it sounds absolutely fascinating, kind of like an arboreal diamagentism. As far as alternatives go, there is a sort of radiant energy "from the vacuum" that we may one day get to use, but the most obvious alternative is solar. We've already crossed the 8% efficiency barrier (up to 24% with the new quantum solar rigs)...if even 1/1000th of the money spent on ethanol had been put toward solar conversion & supercapacitor batteries, we'd be free of most of the artificial constraints which keep us in our place.

Interestingly, no one wants to talk about the portions of the research pie in this regard, for obvious reasons. Even if you make the set up expensive, you can't put a meter on the sun (to paraphrase Jeff Vail's Theory of Power.) Anyway, please let me know when you find that treelectricity thing.

Here's what's probabaly going on in the trees, based on what goes on in any slightly acidic solution between dissimilar metals...

Watch this link, short film, hardly because the world can run on lemons though because it's a common scientific principle that is certainly applicable to other slightly acidic organic liquids, maybe trees. It shows a general method of how to go about testing different trees with zinc nails and copper nails for yourself, to test for electric potentials in different trees.

I don't think this is too off topic. I have a colloidal silver generator. With a proper diet and the silver applied as a topical and ingesting small quantities I took care of a skin disorder on my nose that was present for a few years. It cleared it right up. I was surprised it worked. The silver also had come in handy when a contagious flu was in the air last year. I was consuming about 1,000 mgs of vitamin C daily and ingested about four ounces of colloidal silver before I slept and the first thing in the morning during the high time of flu season. I should have gotten this flu because two people living with me had gotten it. I did not. I trust that the silver had something to do with that.

A friend of mine who is an aging physicist sent me a Bob Livingston Letter newsletter that claims that House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi and top liberals are pressuring the FDA to conduct "reviews" of alternative medicine. The newsletter hints that one of their top priorities is to end the right to make antibiotics, such as colloidal silver, in the home. Is this a hard sell? Is there any truth to this?

If anyone has some knowledge about this I would appreciate a brief response. Thank you. I figure that I will not know unless I ask.

Note who MagCap's customers are? I smell a rat. Let's not forget the rigor and the intuition.

Plugged in: Startup hopes to tap electricity from trees

Don't tell MagCap Engineering's president he's barking up the wrong business model.

His Canton company claims to be developing a process of generating electricity from living trees and is working with an unidentified business in The Netherlands as a possible investor.

But local energy experts have questions about the concept behind the proposal. MagCap Engineering LLC wants to patent a process that converts the natural energy of a tree to usable direct-current electricity, company President Chris Lagadinos said.

He expects to find investors to help pay for the research needed to figure a way to increase the tree power from less than 2 volts to 12 volts sometime this year, creating an alternative to fossil fuels.

Jim Manwell, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Renewable Energy Resource Laboratory, questioned the potential of MagCap's plans. "I'm wildly skeptical," he said. "I would need to see proof before I believed it. It strikes me as pretty questionable for a number of reasons."

MagCap announced the project Dec. 20 and was subsequently inundated with inquiries, Lagadinos said.

"It's been a zoo, the e-mails we've been getting - (we've) been swamped with contacts (from) all over the world. Most of them verified our results to find out we're for real," he said.

Lagadinos declined to name the potential investor. But he said the Dutch company is in the energy-storage business.

Lagadinos said he didn't know how much it would cost to develop the technology nor how long it would take to produce the 12-volt electricity. "I'm hoping within 2006," he said.

MagCap is developing the system with an Illinois-based inventor named Gordon Wadle. Wadle was not available for comment.

Dwayne Breger, manager of the renewable energy and climate change group at the Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources, said he has questions about the source of the energy and whether the process would damage trees.

"My reaction is that it sounds too good to be true," he said. "But I'm interested in seeing what they're able to come up with. What they need to demonstrate is that there's a sustainable energy source over time without a degradation to the tree." MagCap, which was founded in 1969, lists Raytheon Co., Thales Broadcast & Multimedia, Lockheed-Martin Corp. and British Aerospace as some of its customers.

Wadle became interested in the concept while studying lightning coming from the ground, "which led him to believe that there's some type of power emanating from earth, which led him to trees," Lagadinos said.

He said Wadle has worked on the project about one year and enlisted MagCap nine months ago. Lagadinos wasn't sure why Wadle selected MagCap for the project.

Mintz Levin patent attorney Jason Mirabito said he wouldn't have filed the application if he didn't have a reasonable amount of confidence in MagCap's concept. He filed the patent application in early December and expects the approval process to take about three years. Mirabito acknowleged the uniqueness of MagCap's proposal.

"This is really something out of left field," he said. "In my 25 years of practicing patent law, I've never seen anything like this."

Lagadonis said tests have generated 0.8 volts to 1.2 volts by driving an aluminum roofing nail half an inch into a tree attached to a copper water pipe driven 7 inches into the ground. But the electricity is useless because it's unstable and fluctuates.

The trick will be to learn how to filter and stabilize the electricity so it can be used to charge batteries, Lagadinos said.

"It's a renewable source and it's an unlimited source," he said. "It's virtually untapped. The issue is clean energy and it's readily available. There are trees everywhere."

Manwell said his skepticism is science-based.

"There's a fundamental law of physics," he said. "The energy has to come from somewhere."

I have always said that technology is not the root issue here. The issue is the collective sentience and caring of the human species. Can enough people be found who care enough? That has been my fruitless quest for twenty years.

IC, does this sound familiar...it is part of what Wade said from the previous thread. He's not as sure as you....and I'm even less sure than him. I understand his frustration with the fruitlessness. All of us here, or most of us, feel that fruitlessness. When you attempt to tackle the Beast, it quickly adapts and tackles you, instead.

Civilization is Pandora's Box....and I'm afraid once the lid's off, and it is, it must, and will, run its cataclysmic course.

"I have always said that technology is not the root issue here. The issue is the collective sentience and caring of the human species. Can enough people be found who care enough? That has been my fruitless quest for twenty years."

To chime why I consider the issue more one of putting political and consumptive (and other) institutions in sync than the lack of 'caring', is that there are already supermajorities for a 'health, ecology, and sustainable economics' form of politics. I've posted this excerpt once before, for the U.S. polls on this:

These three issues are the true core of U.S. grass roots social politics regardless. Even those who typically 'vote right' (on conservative interpersonal politics) are pro-environment socially, in the U.S. See information below.

However, none of these 'U.S. parties' that run themselves like the French aristocracy of the 1780s more than anything, want to touch health, ecology, or economy issues.

polls health

Majority (65%) of Americans want single-payer health care; willing to pay more taxes to get it. --- In ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll, 3 point margin, Americans by a 2-1 margin, 62-32 percent, prefer universal health insurance program over current employer-based system. 78% dissatisfied with cost of nation's health care, including 54% "very" dissatisfied. Most Americans...54%...now dissatisfied with overall quality of health care in U.S.--first majority in 3 polls since 1993, up 10 points since 2000. --- Public wants government to play leading role in providing health care for all. In the same poll, by almost a two-to-one margin (62% to 33%), Americans said that they preferred a universal system that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program, as opposed to current employer-based system. Slightly different question asked by Kaiser, June '03: more than 7 in 10 ten adults (72%) agreed government should guarantee health insurance for all citizens even if it means repealing most tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush--less than one-quarter (24%) disagreed with this. --- Americans overwhelmingly agree access to health care should be a right. In 2000, as in 1993, 8 in 10 agreed health care be provided equally to citizens; over half agreed “strongly” or “completely.” In 2004, 76% agreed strongly or somewhat that health care should be a right.

polls ecology

The majority (77%) think we should do "whatever it takes" to protect environment. --- In another poll, reported in The Ecologist, upwards of 80% of the U.S. with little difference between left or right want their environmental laws seriously enforced, as well as strengthened.

[This is the issue once more that many of the people who 'vote right' and may be more interpersonally conservative, have the same social policies and weigh in 'on the left' on the health, ecology, and economy issues.]

polls economy

The majority (86 percent) favor raising the minimum wage. The majority (60%) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. --- The majority (87%) think big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. --- The majority (66%) want to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

--- That is the center-..."

As Thayer wrote in a great quote, that I tweaked just a bit in brackets:

"The truth which neither the traditional right nor left wishes to admit, is that broadly enfranchised, local grassroots efforts to identify with and care for natural regions are so powerful, so ultimately democratic, and so basically popular with the American people [or any people] that they threaten the huge, entrenched [placeless, environmentally-degradative, clientelistic, criminal elite] political organizations on both sides." ---(LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, by Robert L. Thayer, Jr.)

Instead of "civilization," I would disaggregate it.

What we are talking about are series of identifiable crony raw material regimes, politically and economically embedded in certain degrading materials, that are criminally gatekeeping against change and consumer choices.

I am skeptical that 'people don't care' given polls. There is instead a huge informal gatekeeping and equally an organizational design disconnect in attempting to transfer issues like health, ecology, and economy concerns above into existing forms of formal institutions and formal policy. Look to that organizational disconnect for the cause I would argue, instead of blaming mass people.

It is difficult to place a direct responsibility on aggregate people when there are high political psychopaths like James Steuart (see above) intentionally organizing whole economies and aggregate lives organizationally against their will, recommending power through consumptive clientelism, massive scales, and lack of choice.

The issue becomes how to remove the gatekeeping placeless state and economic institutions--and this unrepresentative consumptive and political clientelism--that keeps this supermajority care from manifesting their ecological self-interest toward what would be likely more akin to multiple linked bioregionalist areas worldwide.

There's a great quote about this in Green Politics (1986), by Spretnak/Capra:

"The increase in regional consciousness in Dreyeckland is an example of the entwining of the issues and actions that inform Green politics. In the early 1970s the people of the region--who speak Allemannisch as well as German or French--discovered that the national governments had devised a plan to make the entire Rhine Valley an industrial zone from Basel to Rotterdam. In 1972 the Allemannen from the German side of the Rhine crossed the river to occupy the site of a car battery plant that would have produced lead wastes--and was funded with German capital. The following year the Allemannen from France and Switzerland crossed the river to join the long occupation of the two sites, first Briesach and then Wyhl, proposed for a nuclear reactor in the Black Forest area. The Friendship House built by the protesters at Wyhl hosted programs on numerous political issues and highlighted their interconnections for activists who came from all parts of Germany. The local people strengthened their transnational bonds and established an underground radio station, Radio Dreyeckland, which now broadcasts twice a week--in Allemannisch, of course. They also print posters for antimissile demonstrations and other actions in Allemannisch, and they speak once again of their long history of resisting government oppression by the princes. Every year on Pentecost Sunday the people of Dreyeckland hold a bicycle race that crosses the bridges linking the Swiss, French, and German sections of their region; at the climax of the race they throw the flags of all three nations into the Rhine." [p. 48-9]

So I would say it's hardly something called "civilization" (that makes it a functionalist totalizing argument--that ignores that most current institutions are the ones that are harming us instead of providing that functional 'social stability'; many people are aware of such a disconnect in a lack of operational choices--it's intentionally done so, as per Steuart-like ideas above).

It's a very specific organizational disconnect, and one analytically (at least) simple to understand a solution for: to tie in political, economic (and other) institutions more closely how people concern themselves toward ecological self-interest in their own local levels more with larger political and consumptive organizational issues.

The degradative front lines are the placeless political and consumptive institutional design issues--not any particular informal persons in them, just the organizations themselves. These organizational forms are unsustainable. They are degrading the world, our health, ecology, and economics with raw material regimes that demote consumer choices and only have short term placeless goals; they gatekeep against more localized networked and consumptively-overlapped forms of autonomy that would be more sustainable, suggested at the links above.

And thanks for that link, Shrub and Bombay. I added these clips over at "Energy" in Commodity Ecology.

Shrub, My thanks for finding the linkto that article. I noticed it wasdated Jan. 6th 2006. The articleI mentioned was from Feb. 2007.I can only guess that the companyhas moved the technology forwardsince then. Like so many of theseadvancements in alternative formsof energy,you have to be a littlepessimistic about it chances of coming to market. Lets face it. Howmany of these companies have beenbought out just to keep the systemoff line?

I.C. You mentioned that the cost ofelectricity generated through solarpanels is coming down. There is acompany in Italy that has figuredout a way to make solar panelsfrom organic materials. Like...blueberries! Evidently its much less expensive to make solar panels from fruit than it is fromsilicone.Who knew?!

Jeff - have you ever noticed how mediabistro likes to poke fun at reality? I have noticed this many times. Fishbowl DC enjoyed the kwazy kwazy mind control theories floating around about the happy hooker in the Whitehouse when that story was hot.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/

Frankly I don't think Theresa Duncan would have been nearly as bothered by Anna Gaskell's mind controled fake art career if what passes for her art didn't so absolutely incredibly SUCK that one must surely holster a can of Lysol before entering a gallery hosting her explorations in scatology.

"I have always said that technology is not the root issue here. The issue is the collective sentience and caring of the human species. Can enough people be found who care enough? That has been my fruitless quest for twenty years."

I heartily agree that it is about 'collective sentience and caring of the human species.' Tech? I pee on Tec, (but make sure it's unplugged first.)

Now while it will certainly be something to find enough people who care, it will really be a long shot to find enough people who care enough.

Still we must try. First of all some of the people that care enough are at odds with others that also care enough. Not like the stuff that goes on here, more like putting the sins of the leaders on the 'simple Christian' followers of John Hagee, for instance, (who in league with Joe Lieberman and other 'serious' men of Washington, whip the public into a frenzy of righteousness promoting death.)

(Check out the Glenn Greenwald article at Salon, comments also.)

Listen, everybody is looking to have meaning in his or her life. Maybe you do the freemasons; I saw a big new billboard they pay for today, young and old together, very cheery. For others the only game in town is the church. So you join, and make the best of it.

Now, what would happen if all these Good people found out just what it is that confirms in their own mind that they must stop being molded by stale morphic resonance entanglement. (Habits, Demons, Lawyers and Bankers)

Well, they may become your friends, even if they still think different than you. They like you care enough; they simply don't know what they’re supposed to care enough about. (Life rather than death)

In the spirit of S.L.E.U. or Semi-Lucid Eccentrics United, all are free to ignore or discount the preceding material as they see fit.

Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul,
it's not without significance.
Consider that intuitive wisdom to be a Divine attribute,
not a vain suspicion:
the light of the heart has apprehendedintuitively from the Universal Tablet. - Rumi